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Degenesis is a German roleplaying game,the main text for which is released under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. It's got a ton of setting and an interesting system, and Posthuman Studios did an English translation. Unfortunately, they lost the rights to translating the game, and can no longer sell it (and presumably, redistribute anything with its art, since it looks like that's still under a traditional copyright). This poses a problem for me, since I wanted to run a game of Degenesis and can't very well do that if the only source for the .pdf is myself, and the license only covers the text. So, being the industrious little monkey I am, I've copied out the whole text of Degenesis, and began work on fixing the plethora of formatting issues that ensued.

The main problem I have right now is the massive size of Degenesis. The PDF comes to 374 pages, and stripped of formatting it comes to more like 450 pages (which will go back down again once all the accidental line breaks are fixed, and then back up once tables and such are rebuilt by hand). I'm looking for volunteers to take a chapter and work on re-formatting it, then submitting it to me for a final revision. I've decided to excise the final chapter (which is an adventure that can't be run very well without charts and diagrams that I probably can't legally use). I'm looking for people who would be willing to go through about 15 pages (PDF-wise) at a time and fix the following issues:

Line breaks

Word contractions/splits from both PDF copy and bulk-editing induced errors (such as the removal of all hyphens)

Remove the original heading/footer and page number (but not chapter/sub-section headings)

I've done about 30 pages in 3 hours, some of which included figuring out stuff like how to bulk undo line spacing, and at that rate I estimate it'll take ~40 man hours for the whole project, including the somewhat painful act of going through the tables and re-making them. I would like to prioritize those parts myself, since I have an actual PDF of the release.

After that, the remaining work to be done on a truly open (well, as open as BY-SA-NC gets) release of Degenesis will be essentially down to making a character sheet and maybe a sample adventure to go with the rules (though they have plentiful delicious examples).

I found a smarter way to do it: I simply got the Adobe Acrobat trial and the version of the document with layers, and removed all the layers with content that's under anything but the CC license. Typesetting isn't protected in Australian, US, or EU copyright law (at least according to anything I've seen or heard, and I've got a huge copyright law casebook around here somewhere), and in any case the CC declaration says that the "text" of the work is under CC, so I'm assuming it's fair to redistribute under the CC-BY-NC-SA clause now.

So, without further ado, the English Degenesis PDF with all the non-CC elements removed:

I wasn't able to salvage the character sheet (it's an image in the PDF), but it should be available. There's no "freely distributable for personal use" disclaimer on it, though, so I'm not going to redistribute it. There's also a lot of blank pages, but I'll deal with that in the coming days.

EDIT: There are large portions of the text "missing" because they're white and now that the background images are gone there's nothing to show up against. I'll be going through to fix this.

EDIT 2: The errors are pretty pervasive, so it's down until I fix them.

Updated version is up with page numbers corrected at the bottom of the page to match what the new PDF page numbers are after the removal of whitespace.

Some text was still white, and I fixed that now. The two things that remain are to fix up the TOS and get it into a format that I can work with once I no longer have Adobe Acrobat. I did a test .docx export, which was of mixed value; it would work as a reference for my .odt reformatting efforts, but it wouldn't be terribly easy to read through, so it doesn't offer anything that the new PDF doesn't.

Removed "The Jackal's Prophecy", which was removed entirely, from the Table of Contents. I filled the white space this left with a "Table of Contents" label.

Bookmarks and TOC entries had capitalization fixed ("melee Weapons", really?) and some other various fixes. All-in-all, I think almost everything in the Bookmarks and TOC should now fall into a single coherent stylization scheme.

Bookmarks added for Chapter 10.

"AMSUMOT" in TOC changed to "AMSUMO", which seems to match the stylization of both the chapter heading and the text.

Added "The Fall of Ferropol" bookmark to match TOC. Made it function like earlier books by nesting FoF bookmarks under it.

Added "Adventure 1: The Hall of Deceit" bookmark. Made it function like earlier books by nesting HoD bookmarks under it.

A general wiki interface for adding in content.A blog system with multi-user blogging.Forums.

The idea is that it will hold the Catharsys rules pretty faithfully with room for simplified overviews of Degenesis' setting, and be further extensible into a way to discuss the game/system, host games, and have third-party content.

EDIT: Just did some more PDF improvements, mostly on bookmarks but a couple to the TOC and body text.